George Floyd Riots

Etienne Breaks Down the Dialog Society – Who Just Got Caught Having Secret Meetings for Two Decades! YouTube Version Above. BitChute Version HERE. Etienne de la Boetie2, the founder of The Art of Liberty Foundation, joined Hrvoje Moric on Geopolitics & Empire to discuss Etienne’s recent article on CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society. The Dialog Society was caught having secret meetings for TWO DECADES that brought together the intelligence agencies, the monopoly media, the treasury department, the Federal Reserve AND the heads of the leading search engines, social media, and streaming platforms that have been caught algorithmically censoring information on the DARPA Internet. Etienne’s article, which can be found at ArtOfLiberty.Foundation and ArtOfLiberty.org/Dialog-membership-list, is entitled: The REAL Story Behind CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society – Weaponized Inflation, Media Control & AI Kill Drones and it is reproduced in full below with a printable PDF version available HERE. Hrvoje Moric is the founder of Geopolitics & Empire podcast. https://GeopoliticsAndEmpire.comGeopolitics & Empire can be found on Substack here: Geopolitics & EmpireThe Geopolitics & Empire Podcast conducts interviews with prominent international experts on a wide-range of topics. The broadcast seeks to gain insight from guests who come from the left, right, and beyond. The REAL Story Behind CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society – Weaponized Inflation, Media Control & AI Kill DronesCommon Denominator: They are the folks stealing the value of our money while algorithmically censoring information on the DARPA Internet and Building Terminator Robots & DronesBy Etienne de la Boetie2, Founder – The Art of Liberty FoundationBefore we get into the specifics of CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s secret Dialog Society that has been caught organizing secret meetings with participants from Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, US Government Intelligence agency officials and the heads of the media and AI companies algorithmically censoring information on the DARPA Internet (and building terminator robots and drones!), it is important for the uninitiated to understand the scam of “government. ”It is equally as important to understand how the banks and organized crime interests behind “government” (and the CIA’s Dialog Society) are stealing the value out of everyone’s money forcing them to borrow (or borrow more!) at interest from the same banks making homes, healthcare, and education unaffordable. If you already understand the scam of “government,” fractional reserve banking, and how they are stealing $1.40 million from the average worker ($60K annual salary over 40-year career + 20-year retirement), then you can skip ahead to the specifics of the Dialog Society.Understanding the Scam of “Government” – A Technique to Rob and Control Societies Indoctrinated into the Population using Mandatory “Government” Schools and Monopoly Media/Academia.Our thesis at the Art of Liberty Foundation is that “Government” is best thought of as a technique for robbing and controlling populations. It is always illegitimate because it is impossible to have a moral, legitimate “government” because:You can’t be bound to a “social contract” you didn’t signThe population can’t delegate a “government” (or representative ) “rights” they don’t possess themselves… If you don’t have the ability to rob your neighbor or make up rules for him YOURSELF, then you can’t “delegate” that to a “government”You and your friends can’t vote to rob your neighbor because you outnumber him. “Democracy” has the same moral equivalency as a lynching or gang rape.At least three US Presidents have admitted that the US Government is run by, to quote Teddy Roosevelt, “An Invisible Government” behind the scenes with Franklin Delano Roosevelt specifying it as “a financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”“Government” has been the BIGGEST SCAM in ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY!It has, essentially been a manufactured belief system that has been indoctrinated into the public using what we refer to as a “Brute Force Manufactured Consensus” of monopoly “government” schools, scouting programs, police/military training, monopoly media, and algorithmic promotion and censorship of the DARPA Internet.We believe it is the money center banks and their central banks that are using “government” as a technique to rob populations by “legalizing” a scheme called fractional reserve banking that secretly steals the value from the money earned and saved by the population.Find your income level on this chart to understand how muchthe crooked monetary system + government taxation + Social Security underpaymentwill cost you over a 40-year career + 20-year retirementWe have calculated that the theft of purchasing power through inflation + government taxation + Social Security underpayment in the US totals $1.4 MILLION dollars from the average worker making $60,000 per year over a 40-year career+ 20-year retirement. Details at ArtOfLiberty.org/InflationThe theft is significantly more for higher earners ($6.64 Million if you make $250K a Year) and the total has been the Greatest Theft in Human History… Which is the title of my upcoming book on the subject.The Treasury exacerbates the problem by running trillion-dollar deficits and issuing debt to cover them. When the Federal Reserve monetizes that debt — buying the bonds with newly created dollars through “quantitative easing” — it injects trillions of new dollars into the system, stealing still more value from the dollars earned and saved by the population.The Fed and the Treasury engage in other activities that are inflationary as well:Interest on reserves / the Fed’s balance sheet — the Fed paying banks interest on reserves and its general balance-sheet expansion.The discount window and emergency facilities — 2008 and 2020 backstops created money to bail out the banks.Under honest money, the average person should be able to afford more and more each year as innovations and productivity improvements reduce the costs of buying the necessities and luxuries of life, but the crooked monetary system has been secretly stealing the value out of everyone’s money reducing the purchasing power while simultaneously causing asset inflation creating something we are calling “The Compound Trap” where the majority of the population is forced to borrow at interest from the exact same banks that jacked the price of housing, education and healthcare.The Compound Trap illustrated in housing. The dishonest monetary system of the organized crime “government” and banks causes inflation in housing. Fannie Mae’s REO-to-Retail program sells foreclosed homes in bulk to private equity which raises the cost of housing even higher simultaneously forcing many to rent from the same interests who caused the problem OR borrow (or borrow hundreds of thousands more!) from the same interests who caused the problem in the first place.We have estimated the theft at between $182 and $255+ TRILLION dollars that have been stolen from the American people alone between 1913 and 2025. This has resulted in unethical “profits” to the money center banks and banking industry alone of between $20-25 TRILLION dollars over the same time frame not including the trillions handed out the back door by “government” for weapons systems we don’t need, ethanol subsidies, corporate welfare, and other criminality, waste, fraud and abuse.These stolen TRILLIONS have been used to buy up and monopolize the media and major corporations who are operating as a cartel. The ownership appears to be held by asset managers like Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, Berkshire Hathaway and Brookfield to obscure and hide the individual ownership.The C-level executives appear to be coordinated through front groups like Dialog, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Economic Forum which allows the cartel to have regular secret meetings in secure facilities around the world.The Dialog Society Exposes the CoordinationEvery once and while “The System” gets exposed and the recent leak of the membership list of CIA Contractor Peter Thiel’s Dialog Society exposed a secret organization meeting regularly whose common denominators are illustrative of the exact dynamic that I just described.First, Who is Peter Thiel?Peter Thiel is a gay American billionaire who was San Mateo High valedictorian (1985) and a chess Life Master before earning a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford in 1989, then a J.D. from Stanford Law in 1992. At Stanford he co-founded The Stanford Review in 1987 and was its first editor-in-chief, and that paper became the seed of his entire later network.The Review received funding from Irving Kristol, the “father of neoconservatism,” who had documented connections to the CIA and the conservative Collegiate Network, then operated by Irving Kristol and William E. Simon’s Institute for Educational Affairs. William E. Simon was the 63rd Secretary of the Treasury under Richard Nixon and a former Wall Street Executive for both Union Securities and Salomon Brothers. The exact Stanford-specific grant has not been publicly documented, although comparable grants generally ranged from a few thousand dollars to roughly $10,000. $10,000 would be around $30,000 in 2026 dollars. The IEA was supported by major conservative foundations, including Olin, Scaife and Smith Richardson. Kristol and Scaife both had separate historical connections to CIA-funded media operations.Kristol was executive director of the American branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and then, from 1953 to 1958, co-founded and co-edited the London magazine Encounter. Encounter received covert funding from the CIA, which along with MI6 had discussed creating an “Anglo-American left-of-centre publication” to counter Cold War neutralism — and a CIA official later said the journal could not have survived financially without CIA funds. The New York Times reported the CIA’s funding of the CCF and Encounter in 1966, then Ramparts and the Saturday Evening Post detailed it in 1967, lent credence by former CIA officer Thomas Braden’s article “I’m Glad the CIA is ‘Immoral,’” admitting the CIA had subsidized Encounter through the CCF for more than ten years.Kristol left the CCF after the revelations and moved to the American Enterprise Institute. Kristol’s next venture, The Public Interest (1965), was initially financed by Warren Demian Manshel, a wealthy investment-banker also involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, plus the Olin, Bradley and Smith Richardson foundations who would go on to fund The Stanford Review as well.Manshel had a Harvard PhD in government and shared an office and a friendship with Henry Kissinger as a teaching fellow at Harvard; he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-founded the European Options Exchange in Belgium in 1978, co-founded Foreign Policy magazine with Samuel P. Huntington (Trilateral Commission and CFR), and was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Denmark by President Carter, serving 1978–1981.Thiel also served as president of the Stanford Federalist Society, and shortly after law school worked as a speechwriter for former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett and clerked for an 11th Circuit judge after interviewing (unsuccessfully) with Justices Scalia and Kennedy.Thiel co-founded Confinity in 1998, which became PayPal after merging with Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000; he was CEO until eBay bought it for ~$1.5 billion in 2002, spawning a group of early tech executives that has become known as the “PayPal Mafia.” PayPal benefited from government-granted money transmitter licenses.Facebook is born on the day that DARPA, allegedly, pulls the plug on a program they were running called Lifelog that was doing essentially the same thing that Facebook would go on to do: map the connections between friends, events, relationships, etc. Regina Dugan was DARPA director (2009–2012), then led Google’s Advanced Technology & Projects group (2012–2016), then ran Facebook’s Building 8 (2016–2018)Thiel goes on to make the first outside investment in Facebook in 2004 — $500K for roughly 10% and a board seat — and founded Founders Fund and the hedge fund Clarium.Thiel co-founds Palantir in 2003–04 with Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings, adapting PayPal’s anti-fraud pattern-detection to allegedly combat terrorism. The CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel invested about $2 million — effectively the only outside money. The CIA was Palantir’s first government customer.Palantir’s software (Gotham, Foundry, and its newer AI Platform) is now embedded across the CIA, Pentagon, ICE, IRS, CDC, Army and multiple other federal agencies. Federal contracts jumped from about $541 million in 2024 to roughly $970 million in 2025, headlined by a July 2025 U.S. Army “Enterprise Agreement” worth up to $10 billion over ten years that consolidates 75 separate contracts into one, plus a $30 million ICE contract for a system called ImmigrationOS and DOGE-linked work on a cross-agency deportation database — all drawing civil-liberties scrutiny. Palantir went public in 2020; Thiel remains chairman.ArtOfLiberty.org/Fact-Check/JD-VanceBeyond BILLIONS in contracts, his government footprint is heavily political and networked. He was Trump’s most prominent Silicon Valley backer in 2016 (a convention speech, ~$1.25M donation, and a transition-team seat), and he is the patron behind the current Vice President — he put roughly $15M behind JD Vance’s 2022 Senate run (and another $15M behind Blake Masters’s Senate Campaign) after employing Vance at his firm. He sits on the Bilderberg Steering Committee, he is a co-founder of the Dialog society with Auren Hoffman, runs the Thiel Fellowship (paying students to skip college), was granted New Zealand citizenship in 2011 after spending only about 12 days in the country, and secretly financed the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker in 2016.Our theory is that groups like Dialog are where the bankers and government/media puppets meet to coordinate the monopolization of the media, the algorithmic and now AI censorship of information, and police state / surveillance technologies that keep this inter-generational organized crime system in business.You can find a list of 140 names that have been publicly exposed below cross referenced with their affiliations to three other organized crime front groups, because one of the “Big Reveals” of the Dialog Leak is that many of the members are running their own front groups and “policy shops” where they are having additional secret meetings on a regular basis which is an exponential projection of power much greater than wielded by the identified members.Sub-groups / Cross-Affiliations of the Dialog SocietyThe Council on Foreign Relations ( 25% of the exposed members are CFR… 35 members out of 140 if you include Tulsi Gabbard who has been a CFR member but isn’t on the current list while she is serving as DNI)Key CFR Leadership at Dialog: Robert Rubin (Chairman Emeritus), Richard Haass (President Emeritus), Peggy Hamburg (current Director), Henry Kravis (former Director)2011 Chart from the Foundation to Restore an Educated Electorate showing Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission penetration of the US Government at every key position of power going back decades through both Republican and Democrat administrations. The CFR, which apparently birthed the World Economic Forum whose founder Klaus Schwab was mentored/recruited by CFR figures, was the original intelligence-agency connected front group for secret meetings that “Penetrated the Cabinets” to use WEF-founder Klaus Schwab’s famous line describing the strategy of the WEF.The Bilderberg Group – 10% of known attendees – 14 people out of 140 (Summers, Thiel, Karp, Schmidt, Kravis, Driscoll, Reid Hoffman, Kushner, Tugendhat, Palmer Luckey, Bret Stephens, Kallas, Adam Grant, and Andresseen (reported)Key Bilderberg Leadership at Dialog: Steering Committee: Alex Karp (CEO, Palantir), Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel (also Dialog’s co-founder)A close-up crop of the Ultimate Bilderberg Chart of Connected Politicians, Corporations and Organizations. See Below for Details.This Bilderberg Group visualization has been kicking around the internet for years without good attribution (or it is being hidden) and shows the board and organizational connections of 4-5 dozen Bilderberg attendees. You can download the full high-resolution visualization from The Liberator Here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/epa4cq9yzo46uiz/Ultimate_Bilderberg_Flowchart_Connected_Politicians_Corporations.jpg?dl=0 You can download the White Rose MUCHO GRANDE poster here: https://artofliberty.org/white-rose/poster4/The World Economic Forum – 10% (14 out of 140) – Another suspected organized crime front group that “Penetrates the Cabinets” of easily captured “governments.” The World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded on January 24th, 1971 as the European Management Symposium, then renamed the European Management Forum, then WEF by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. Evidence points to Schwab being recruited by Henry Kissinger during a seminar series at Harvard revealed to have been funded by the CIA in 1967. Kissinger would go on to become Secretary of State, a Rockefeller advisor, and National Security Advisor. Herman Kahn and John Kenneth Galbraith would help get the EMF off the ground by traveling to Europe to help with Schwab’s recruitment efforts. Kissinger and Galbraith were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the US branch of Cecil Rhodes’s Anglo-American imperialist “Round Table” network that had established outposts in most Anglo countries and “penetrated the cabinets” and media in the US and Europe in previous decades (and currently) the exact same way that Schwab’s WEF has done in this decade.World Economic Forum Leadership: There is none (so far) but many Dialog members haven’t been identified yet. WEF cross-affiliated members include: Elon Musk (YGL 2008), Peter Thiel (YGL 2007), Jim Breyer (WEF committees), and Tulsi Gabbard (YGL selected 2015, but claims she was never active.)The WEF figured prominently in the scam of “The Covid” which demonstrated that monied interests can easily install political puppets using disparity of campaign funds, media monopolization/coverage, etc. to install political puppets that “Penetrate the Cabinets” and executive branch leadership.The Berggruen Institute – 3.6% overlap (5 of 140 cross-reference Dialog members) The Berggruen Institute is a Los Angeles–based think tank founded in 2010 by billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen (b. 1961, Paris) and journalist Nathan Gardels, focused on governance, philosophy, economics, and technology, with centers in Beijing and Venice. Berggruen is the son of German-Jewish art dealer Heinz Berggruen; he studied finance at NYU and built his ~$2–3 billion fortune through Berggruen Holdings (founded 1984), with major bets in real estate, retail (Karstadt), and media including Spanish media group Prisa which owns El País (Spain’s largest newspaper), the radio network Cadena SER, and other outlets. Berggruen once described the institute as the “new Bilderberg Group” on their website… and then took it down!Berggruen/Dialog Leadership & Attendees include: Nicholas Berggruen (Founder and Chair), Reid Hoffman (Board), Larry Summers, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt who were all on Berggruen’s 21st Century Council.So what do the members of Dialog Have in Common?If you want to rob the world then you have to have meetings, BUT I am not saying that every Dialog Member is an unindicted co-conspirator. Similar to other front organization policy shops, many members are window dressing similar to “Porch Masons” to disguise what is going on in the back rooms and make things more interesting for the REAL attendees. Axios’s reporting described “small, moderated conversations with assigned seats and absolute confidentiality” which could easily separate the nefarious from the innocuous where the window dressing isn’t invited to the REAL sessions.So.. If we strip away the eye-candy and “porch members” and analyze which members fall into our thesis of organized crime centered around banking/central banking buying the world with the little paper tickets they create out of thin air while monopolizing the media and algorithmically censoring information on major tech platforms lets see who drops into those buckets:Stealing the Value Out of Our Money – Central Banking & Money Center BankingSimilar to the 2011 Foundation to Restore an Educated Electorate chart I used above and below, which was entitled: Who Profits from the Present Usury Money System?, I am going to start my analysis with the top of the food chain: The money center bankers, treasury department officials, and federal reserve leaders that are represented at Dialog and every one of the other front groups and policy shops that enable regular meetings in secure facilities with the government officials, monopoly media, and intelligence agency members that sustain, protect, deflect and distract away from TRILLIONS of dollars that are being siphoned away from the American people.In this chart from the 2010 F.R.E.E visualization: Who Profits from the Present Usury Money System, we can see the pattern of money center bankers, Federal Reserve Board Members, and Secretaries of the Treasury riding herd over Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg Group meetings as well with Dialog members Laurence “Larry” Summers and Robert Rubin appearing on both lists.It is interesting to note that Larry Summers (along with Peter Thiel) were both connected to Rothschild banking agent and suspected Mossad agent Jeffrey Epstein with both having verified in-person meetings and Thiel being referenced over 2,000 times in the Epstein files that have been released so far. Connections include: a Nov 2017 lunch with Thiel on Epstein’s schedule, a declined island invitation, and a reported $40M Epstein investment into Thiel’s Valar Ventures funds in 2015–2016 (NYT, June 2025). Epstein arranged for Former Israeli Prime Minister/Head of the IDF Ehud Barak to meet Thiel in New York in 2014.We have already broken down above how central banking backstops the money center banks to create money out of thin air and enable deficit spending by the organized crime “government.”Control of the Media – Is this Operation Mockingbird 2.0?During the 1976 U.S. Senate Church Committee hearings, it was revealed that the CIA maintained a network of hundreds of publishers, editors, and reporters to influence global opinion.We believe the CIA utilizes monopoly media to control the “head ends” of the information food chain. Through highly coordinated private networks, they manipulate public consensus, dictate mainstream policy narratives, and steer global media coverage across DOZENS of ostensibly independent news organizations.A page from my book “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! breaking down the connections between the intelligence agencies and the media including JD Vance, who we believe is an agency “Created Legend” who was a commentator at CNN before Thiel funded his Senate campaign with $15 million dollars. Article Version HERE.Reportedly, the program had various monikers: “[Frank] Wisner’s Wurlitzer,” “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” and “Operation Mockingbird.”It is rumored that “Mockingbird” referred to the strategy of controlling the “head ends” of the information food chain—The New York Times, The Washington Post, AP, and CNN—ensuring that smaller regional and local media outlets, as well as the public, would “mockingbird” and repeat the controlled narrative.Interestingly, many of the Dialog members come from the same “Head Ends” the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. BUT more interestingly is that many are/were running entire media networks Veit Dengler, Isaac Lee, etc. BUT even more more interestingly are the presence of CFR and Bilderberg leadership who are running similar secret meetings with an estimated 100+ more publishers, editors, reporters AND network heads AND private equity and/or ownership of entire networks.The chart at the bottom of the graphic above is a poster we produced from an analysis done by Swiss Propaganda Research in 2017 showing how just three organizations, the CFR, Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group have maneuvered, installed or recruited the key publishers, editors, and reporters from DOZENS of ostensibly independent media outlets. Dialog is populated with 3 members of the Bilderberg Steering Committee (Thiel, Karp and Schmidt) and the Chairman Emeritus of the CFR Robert Rubin, the President Emeritus of the CFR Richard Haass, in addition to Board Member Peggy Hamburg and 25% of the identified Dialog members so far. The same dynamic is taking place at the Berggruen Institute, which is represented by the Chairman and Founder, Nicholas Berggruen, along with Berggruen advisors/supporters: Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk.These are the media operations that sold you: “The Covid,” WMDs in Iraq, the official story of 9/11, Kuwaiti babies thrown from incubators, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, WMDs in Iran, OKC BOMB, Waco, January 6, and the legitimacy of “government,” fractional-reserve banking, and easily rigged elections.The Algorithmic Censorship of the InternetWe like to say that Control of Perception is the most powerful weapon in the US arsenal. Can the organized crime system make you believe you aren’t a free and independent human being BUT, by virtue of where you are born, you are an American (It’s been decided for you!) and you owe over 50% of your income in overt taxes, covert taxes and inflation to Washington DC? Can they trick you into the no-win game of easily rigged elections where their monopoly media system and unlimited digital dollars guarantee that only political puppets funded by AIPAC are elected? Can they hide the fact that their crooked monetary system, taxes (theft) + Social Security underpayment is going to steal an average of $1.40 million from a median worker over a 40-year career and 20-year retirement with much more stolen from higher earners?Control-of-Perception is a Binary Weapon composed of the aforementioned monopolization of the media BUT is also composed of the algorithmic censorship of the DARPA Internet.Map showing the Military’s ARPANET in 1969 and 1982, the organized crime “government” had plenty of time to figure out how they were going to control perception widely and profit from doing it before it was released to the public.Many people forget that the Internet is a military network that was released to the public only after the military and intelligence agencies had over two decades to study it and figure out which key technologies they needed to dominate to widely control perception on the internet.From the Article: How the CIA Made Google that breaks down the connection between Google’s founding and DARPA, the Pentagon and the Pentagon’s partnership with Silicon Valley: The Highland Forum:In 1989, Richard O’Neill, then a US Navy cryptologist, wrote a paper for the US Naval War College, ‘Toward a methodology for perception management.’ In his book, Future Wars, Col. John Alexander, then a senior officer in the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), records that O’Neill’s paper for the first time outlined a strategy for “perception management” as part of information warfare (IW). O’Neill’s proposed strategy identified three categories of targets for IW: adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable; potential partners, “so they perceive the cause [of war] as just”; and finally, civilian populations and the political leadership so they “perceive the cost as worth the effort.” A secret briefing based on O’Neill’s work “made its way to the top leadership” at DoD. “They acknowledged that O’Neill was right and told him to bury it.Except the DoD didn’t bury it. Around 1994, the Highlands Group/Highland Forum was founded by O’Neill as an official Pentagon project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense secretary William Perry — who went on to join SAIC’s board of directors after retiring from government in 2003.In O’Neill’s own words, the group would function as the Pentagon’s ‘ideas lab’. According to Government Executive, military and information technology experts gathered at the first Forum meeting “to consider the impacts of IT and globalization on the United States and on warfare. How would the Internet and other emerging technologies change the world?” The meeting helped plant the idea of “network-centric warfare” in the minds of “the nation’s top military thinkers.”An Art of Liberty Foundation White Rose MUCHO GRANDE poster showing a Media Ownership Chart from 2006 showing six companies running HUNDREDS of subsidiaries to give the illusion of diversity of information.In many ways it appears to be an extension of the Operation Mockingbird program that monopolized print, radio, television, and appears to organize and control the promoted “journalists” being organized by Dialog, CFR, Bilderberg, the WEF, and the Berggruen Institute.Google alone, which was connected to exact same Highland Group/Highland Forum which specified the “Perception Management” strategy and is represented at Dialog by former CEO Eric Schmidt, has been caught both algorithmically amplifying certain voices while algorithmically censoring other voices especially with Google News.The Columbia Journalism Review article: Audit suggests Google [News] favors a small number of major outlets, which we syndicate in our unauditiable flash drive (and free Dropboxes!) of Liberty: The Liberator, breaks down how Google News directs traffic to a small number of outlets. At the same time that they are pumping up certain news sites and information, ex-Google employee and whistle-blower Zach Voorhies has released documents and testimony that Google is algorithmically censoring other information. Notice that CNN, which dominates our list of CIA-connected journalists above also dominates CIA-connected Google’s list of promoted news sources.Here is a list of the Dialog participants whose companies have large-scale algorithmic content-ranking and moderation power, the vast majority of which have been caught censoring, demonetizing, shadow-banning truth tellers, plus other propaganda crimes.These are the media companies that sold you “The Covid,” the official story of 9/11, Kuwaiti babies thrown out of incubators, WMD’s in Iraq, January 6th, obviously rigged elections with unauditable black box voting machines and mail-in ballots, and the legitimacy of “government.”Facebook alone, represented by initial investor Thiel, Marc Andreessen (Early Investor), Adam D’Angelo (former CIO), and Charlie Songhurst (Board Director, Meta) have censored multiple voluntaryist, libertarian, and truth movement news organizations off their platform including organizations that had MILLIONS of followers.Some of the affected organizations included The Free Thought Project (3 million + followers) and the Anti-Media (2 million + followers) and the Art of Liberty Foundation’s original Etienne de la Boetie2 account in what has been called: The Great Social Media Purge of 2018. Alex Jones’ InfoWars was simultaneously deplatformed by Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Vimeo, Pinterest, MailChimp, and LinkedIn at essentially the exact same time showing a degree of high-level coordination. The Facebook executive that coordinated the purges, Nathaniel Gleicher, was the ex-Director for Cyber Security Policy at the National Security Council and Facebook has been exposed by MintPress News for being populated with “EX” CIA officers, FBI agents, and other intelligence agency veterans in content moderation.Aaron Berman, a 17-year veteran of the CIA who already held a senior position on Facebook’s “misinformation” team during the 2020 election, was promoted in 2023 to “Head of Elections Policies” at the company now known as MetaThe Art of Liberty Foundation’s Substack audience was more than doubling each year until last year when Substack took a $100M investment led by BOND and the Chernin Group, with a16z (Andreessen) participating. BOND is tied to In-Q-Tel and the Defense Innovation Board. Now we are having to spend $20,000 to move ourselves off the platform and build our own censorship-resistant infrastructure to keep getting this information out to the publicMarc Andreessen, who has suspiciously invested in multiple social media platforms that have been caught censoring, recently participated in a $100M round of financing for Substack led by BOND Partners (BOND, get it.. James Bond/Intelligence agencies) whose partners include “Ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-Kleiner Perkins, ex-CIA In-Q-Tel, and a member of the Defense Innovation Board. At almost the exact time that this investment was made, the Art of Liberty Foundation’s Substack which had been doubling year-over-year, began heading in the opposite direction. Other liberty and truth movement-oriented authors saw the exact same declines at the exact same time.AI-Driven Autonomous Weapons Systems: Drones, Terminator Robots & AI Targeting (Military and Civilian)In one of the most troubling “coincidences” of Dialog, we have what can only be described as the top CEOs, investors, and in the case of US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, procurers of AI-driven autonomous weapons system, terminator robots, & AI targeting in both military and “civilian” applications.AI Drones – AI Drones are drones that can be launched and targeted using lists drawn up by AI and/or guided and targeted using AI. The drones can be used to kill individuals based on facial recognition, location, or other targeting information.An Anduril Bolt-M drone is diving for an attack before exploding, showering an unoccupied target vehicle with anti-materiel fodder. Anduril CEO and founder Palmer Luckey is a Dialog participant while Thiel, Lonsdale, and Andreessen are investors.Pentagon, intelligence agency, and NASA contractor Elon Musk’s Optimus Robots – a general purpose, bi-pedal, autonomous humanoid robot capable of being remotely reprogrammed at any time in the future by the same folks who sold you “The Covid,” bankrupted small businesses, and forced injections into family members.Terminator Robots – Even robots (or even self-driving cars) can be used as dual-use military devices under pressure from an organized crime “government”.” Dialog participant Elon Musk has already promised a world where his Tesla robots will outnumber humans.Dialog Society founder Peter Thiel (2nd from right) and participant Alex Karp (3rd from left) meeting with Israeli military officials. Israel has been accused of genocide against the Palestinian people using AI targeting in the massacre.AI Targeting – Military – AI targeting is where AI systems determine what individual people (high-value commanders, officers vs. enlisted, etc.), assets (tanks vs. trucks on a battlefield) or buildings are targeted in a scenario where dozens or hundreds of autonomous and/or programmable weapons are launched at once. The Israeli military has already been caught using a system called Lavender for targeting and another tool called “Where’s Daddy” which uses AI to determine when a target is with their family so the entire family is killed vs. just the target. Dialog participant and Palantir CEO Alex Karp has already bragged that Palantir is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine.”AI Targeting – Civilian – Palantir has been ICE’s data backbone since about 2013, when it built the Investigative Case Management system. In April 2025 ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS, folded into the existing sole-source ICM deal that has ballooned past $145 million. Its stated functions: prioritizing who gets removed first, tracking self-deportations in near real time, and streamlining removal logistics.In March 2025 Trump signed an executive order to eliminate data “silos” across agencies. The New York Times then reported the administration tapped Palantir’s Foundry to carry it out, with talks underway at the IRS and Social Security Administration, and the ACLU warned of “a panopticon of a single federal database” — a centralized dossier on everyone in the country. Palantir publicly called the reporting “blatantly untrue,” said it “never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans,” BUT given they are using their tech to murder people, why would anyone believe them?The Danger for FreedomWe believe the illegitimacy and criminality of monopoly “government” is slowly and surely spreading. Every day more and more people realize that the “government” is illegitimate on its face and being run as a criminal enterprise in Washington, DC. We, and many others, are exposing the TRILLIONS of dollars that have been stolen through fractional reserve banking, inflation, no bid contracts, corporate welfare, and needless, overpriced weapons for wars based on lies and manufactured intelligence.We think these autonomous weapons systems are being built for a time when the knowledge of this organized crime system spreads to the police and military who are having their own pensions and savings devalued by the organized crime banks and “government” that tricked them with unethically manipulative propaganda and indoctrination.Dialog founder and CIA contractor Peter Thiel already broke down the bankster and organized crime “government” case for autonomous weapons on the Joe Rogan podcast: “The natural development of drone technology … is you need to take the human out of the loop because the human can get jammed.”What is Behind the Paywall Today?The Formatted, Print-Ready Version of this Article and a HUGE THANK YOU! for Making it Possible!The List of Prominent Known Dialog Participants- Cross-referenced with CFR, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, World Economic Forum & Berggruen Institute affiliations- Intelligently categorizedDialog is a private, invitation-only network founded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and data entrepreneur Auren Hoffman. It runs both an ongoing paid-membership organization and separate off-the-record retreats attended by members, guests, speakers and prospective recruits. Internal material reportedly describes more than 1,000 paying members and more than 2,500 people who have attended its retreats since 2006.How many names have been exposed?There are several different numbers because the leak contained overlapping—but not identical—datasets:Category 1 — Federal Reserve, Fractional Reserve Banking and US Treasury “Legal” Counterfeiting of US Dollars· Scott Bessent — U.S. Treasury Secretary — Council on Foreign Relations (verified against current CFR member roster). Not on the official Bilderberg 2026 participant list.· Robert Rubin — Fmr. Secretary, U.S. Treasury; fmr. Co-Chairman, Goldman Sachs —Co-Chairman Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations.· Larry Summers — Former U.S. Treasury Secretary; former president of Harvard University —Bilderberg Meeting participant (2025), Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Agenda Contributor and speaker at World Economic Forum, Member Trilateral Commission· Randy Kroszner — Former Federal Reserve governor; Bank of England Financial Policy Committee, Chair/Vice-Chair/Member of the WEF Global Agenda Council on the Global Financial System 2008–2009 and 2010–2016Category 2 — Autonomous drones, robotics & AI targeting (military & civilian)Companies and people building, owning, or funding autonomous/AI systems with weapons applications. Government counterpart: — listed under Government.· Palmer Luckey — Founder, Anduril Industries; co-founder, Oculus VR. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2024)Anduril builds autonomous attack and loitering-munition drones, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice AI battle-management software — among the most explicit autonomous-weapons companies in the U.S. defense base.· Alex Karp — Co-founder & CEO, Palantir Technologies. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2019, 2022, 2024, 2025, 2026) + Steering CommitteePalantir’s Gotham and Maven AI platforms generate and prioritize military targets — Karp says the company is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine.” Palantir signed a Jan 2024 strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and Karp has said “our product is used on occasion to kill people.”· Peter Thiel — Co-founder/chairman, Palantir; Founders Fund; early Anduril backer. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2007–2016, 2019, 2022, 2024, 2025; 2026 not on official participant list) + Steering Committee (current); WEF Young Global Leader 2007*Co-founded Palantir and, through Founders Fund, was an early backer of Anduril. Asked about the Lavender targeting system, Thiel said his “bias is to defer to Israel,” underscoring his ownership stake in AI-targeting infrastructure.· Joe Lonsdale — Co-founder, Palantir; founder, 8VC. No cross-org match found in checked sources.Co-founded Palantir and runs 8VC, a venture firm that is one of the largest funders of autonomous-defense startups (Anduril, Saronic and others).· Eric Schmidt — Ex-CEO, Google; Schmidt Futures; CEO, Relativity Space. Affiliations: CFR; Bilderberg (2008–2024 across many years, 2025, 2026) + Steering Committee; Bohemian Grove (leaked 2023 list†)Chaired the U.S. National Security Commission on AI and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, and has personally funded military-drone and autonomy ventures — the leading establishment advocate for integrating AI into warfighting. (Also fits the content-moderation bucket via Google.)· Elon Musk — CEO, Tesla & SpaceX; owner, X; founder, xAI. Intelligence agency, Dept of War, and NASA Contractor with BILLIONS in “government” contracts and tax breaks for his electric vehicles.Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot and Full Self-Driving are dual-use autonomy platforms, and SpaceX/Starlink is now critical military communications infrastructure (decisive in Ukraine). “Weaponizable” here is a capability/dual-use observation, not a current weapons product.· Dan Driscoll (U.S. Army Secretary, Bilderberg 2026), who oversees Army procurement of these systemsCategory 3 — AI, Algorithmic Content Moderation & the “Censorship-Industrial Complex”These are participants whose companies have large-scale algorithmic content-ranking/moderation power, or who have funded information operations. Capability is documented; whether a given activity is “censorship” is contested and attributed.· Eric Schmidt — Ex-CEO, Google. Affiliations: CFR; Bilderberg (2008–2024 across many years, 2025, 2026) + Steering Committee; Bohemian Grove (leaked 2023 list†)Ran Google during the build-out of its search-ranking and YouTube moderation systems and has funded election/information-integrity initiatives — a central figure in any map of algorithmic information control.· Neal Mohan — CEO, YouTube. Affiliations: CFRRuns YouTube’s recommendation algorithm and its content-removal and demotion policies — one of the largest content-governance systems on earth, with direct power to amplify or suppress information at scale.· Yasmin Green — CEO, Jigsaw (a Google incubator).Leads Jigsaw, a Google unit that builds tools to counter “disinformation,” extremism and “threats to open societies,” and served on the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Google frames this as countering harm; the Censorship-Industrial-Complex critique reads it as institutionalized content control.· Tom Lue — Global affairs lead, Google’s frontier-AI division. Gemini’s image generator produced historically absurd and racially biased images due to over-aggressive efforts to force diversityLeads global affairs and policy for Google’s frontier-AI division, which sets the guardrails and output-filtering for Google’s most powerful models — content governance at the model layer.· Reid Hoffman — Co-founder, LinkedIn; partner, Greylock (Connected to CIA Venture Firm In-Q-Tel) . Affiliations: CFR; Bilderberg (2017, 2019, 2022)Documented funder of social-media influence operations: he financed “Project Birmingham,” a 2017 Alabama false-flag disinformation effort (~$100K via AET/New Knowledge), and the “News for Democracy” Facebook network. Hoffman apologized for Birmingham and said he was unaware of its tactics.· Jonathan Greenblatt — CEO, Anti-Defamation League. Affiliations: CFRThe ADL flags online content and lobbies platforms over moderation decisions and is frequently cited in censorship-critical reporting; the ADL frames this work as countering antisemitism and hate. Listed for the capability/role, not as an established “censor” (contested).· Elon Musk — Owner, X. Intelligence agency, Dept of War, and NASA Contractor with BILLIONS in “government” contracts and tax breaks for his electric vehicles.X performs algorithmic ranking and moderation like any large platform, X content moderation team populated by “Ex” FBI personnel per Alan Macleod/Mint Press News. If the DARPA Internet was Internet 1.0, then Starlink is DARPA Internet 2.0 where profits are being privatized to defense industry insiders.· Greg Brockman — Co-founder & President, OpenAI; ex-CTO, Stripe. OpenAI (primarily through ChatGPT and related models) has been extensively documented for political bias and content filtering that functions as censorship on certain topics and viewpoints· Jason Kwon — Chief Strategy Officer, OpenAI. Trilateral Commission 2026 Annual Plenary (Tokyo) participant list. Plenary participant lists can include invited guests and speakers, not only members- 14 out of 15 political bias tests administered by David Rozado diagnosed Chat GPTs responses as left-leaning (favoring progressive positions on economics, social issues, environment, etc.)· Adam D’Angelo — Co-founder & CEO, Quora; ex-CTO, Facebook. Quora has been caught censoring pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionism voices (Dr. Rima Najjar) among others· Charlie Songhurst — Board Director, Meta; ex-Head of Corporate Strategy, Microsoft – Meta/Facebook caught censoring information during “The Covid” including true information that could “cause vaccine hesitancy”Category 4 — Mockingbird Media· Richard Haass — Diplomat; President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations. Affiliations: CFR (President Emeritus)· Ezra Klein — Columnist, The New York Times.· Bret Stephens — Opinion Columnist & Associate Editor, The New York Times. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2024)· Nick Thompson — CEO, The Atlantic; ex-Editor-in-chief, Wired. Affiliations: CFR· Souad Mekhennet — National security correspondent, The Washington Post.· Veit Dengler — Member of Austrian Parliament, Media executive; co-founder, NEOS political party (Austria) former Chief Operating Officer of Bauer Media Group, which employs more than 11,000 people across 13 countries in Europe and North America· Isaac Lee — Chairman & CEO, Hybe America, former Board Member Associated Press, Former President of the News for Univision. CFRCategory 5— Government, intelligence, military, law & diplomacy· Ted Cruz — U.S. Senator (Texas). Dialog-status note: named in the leaked Dialog directory; Cruz said publicly he attended only a couple of meetings over a decade ago.· Cory Booker — U.S. Senator (New Jersey).· Tulsi Gabbard — U.S. Director of National Intelligence. Affiliations: CFR per 2019 reporting; not in current-roster, WEF Young Global Leader (2015), Former Civil Affairs officer in the Military· Jared Kushner — Founder, Affinity Partners; ex-White House senior adviser. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2019)· Wes Moore — Governor of Maryland. Affiliations: CFR Dialog-status note: named on the leaked 2026 retreat registration list (entry “Governor, State of Maryland”); a spokesman said he spoke at a Thiel event roughly a decade ago with no involvement since — though Axios (Aug 2025) had reported him as a Dialog member.· Jim Himes — U.S. Representative (Connecticut); ranking member, House Intel. Affiliations: CFR· Gen. Alexus Grynkewich — NATO SACEUR; head of U.S. European Command. Affiliations: CFR Dialog-status note: leaked records list him as attending Dialog gatherings since 2021.· Hallie Hoffman — Ex-general counsel & acting chief of staff, DEA.· Lisa Monaco — Ex-U.S. Deputy Attorney General. Affiliations: CFR· Jim O’Neill — HHS Deputy Secretary nominee; co-founder, Thiel Fellowship.· Jared Polis — Governor of Colorado. Dialog-status note: named in the leak; his spokesperson denied membership, said he does not recall attending and had not previously heard of Dialog.· Will Scharf — White House Staff Secretary (see correction note). No cross-org match found in checked sources.· Tom Tugendhat — Member of Parliament, United Kingdom. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2019, 2022, 2023, 2024)· Kaja Kallas — Vice President, European Commission; ex-PM of Estonia. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2024) Dialog-status note: named on the leaked list; the European Commission denies she is a member or will attend the Aug 2026 retreat (Axios had listed her as a 2025 participant).· Tarō Kōno — Former Minister for Digital Transformation (2022–2024); ex-Minister of Defense, Japan; current Member, House of Representatives. Affiliations: Trilateral Commission (verified: current member, Asia Pacific Group)· Jens Spahn — German Bundestag; ex-Federal Minister of Health.· Shahid Khaqan Abbasi — Ex-Prime Minister of Pakistan; founder, Airblue.· Turki Al Faisal Al Saud — Founder, King Faisal Foundation; ex-Saudi intelligence chief.· Reema Al-Saud — Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the U.S..· Ali Siddiqui — Board Chair, OnZero; ex-Pakistan Ambassador to the U.S..· Himanshu Gulati — Member of Parliament, Norway.· Simon Stevens — UK House of Lords; ex-CEO, NHS England.· Mitch Daniels — Ex-Governor of Indiana; ex-president, Purdue University.· Stan McChrystal — Founder & CEO, McChrystal Group; ex-U.S. Army General. Affiliations: CFR Dialog-status note: named in the leak; told The Guardian he attended two Dialog events about a decade ago but does not consider it membership.· Matt Clifford — UK PM’s AI adviser; co-founder, Entrepreneur First.· Neal Katyal — Partner, Milbank; ex-Acting Solicitor General.· Preet Bharara — Ex-U.S. Attorney, SDNY.· Rachel Brand — Chief Legal Officer, Walmart; ex-Associate Attorney General. Affiliations: CFR· Rob Hur — Ex-Special Counsel, U.S. DOJ. Affiliations: CFR· Tom Goldstein — Partner, Goldstein & Russell; founder, SCOTUSblog.· Julian Castro — Ex-Secretary, U.S. HUD. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader 2010*· Richard Haass — Diplomat; President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations. Affiliations: CFR (President Emeritus)Category 6 — Finance, investment & industry· Henry Kravis — Co-founder, KKR. Affiliations: CFR; Bilderberg (multiple years)· Chamath Palihapitiya — Founder & CEO, Social Capital. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader 2007*· Randy Kroszner — Ex-Federal Reserve governor; Bank of England FPC.· Gaurav Kapadia — Founder & CEO, XN. Council on Foreign Relations· Karen Karniol-Tambour — Co-CIO, Bridgewater Associates. Affiliations: CFR· Micky Malka — Founder & Managing Partner, Ribbit Capital.· Mike Novogratz — CEO, Galaxy Digital; ex-CIO, Fortress.· Barry Silbert — Founder & CEO, Digital Currency Group.· Barry Sternlicht — Co-founder, Chairman & CEO, Starwood Capital.· John Arnold — Co-Chair, Arnold Ventures; ex-founder, Centaurus Advisors.· Nicolas Berggruen — Founder & President, Berggruen Holdings. Affiliations: CFR· Pete Briger — Principal & Chairman, Fortress Investment Group. Affiliations: CFR· Peter Brown — CEO, Renaissance Technologies.· Thasunda Brown Duckett — President & CEO, TIAA.· Matt Cohler — Ex-General Partner, Benchmark.· Bob Jain — CIO, Millennium Management; founder, Jain Family Institute.· Wences Casares — Founder & ex-CEO, Xapo Bank. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader 2011*· Sheikh Nawaf Saud Nasir Al-Sabah — CEO, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation.· Steve Ells — Founder & ex-CEO, Chipotle.Category 7— Technology (founders & executives)· Auren Hoffman — Chairman & co-founder, Dialog; data entrepreneur (SafeGraph/LiveRamp). Affiliations: CFR· Astro Teller — Captain of Moonshots, Google X (Alphabet). Projects at Google X include Google Glass, Google Self-Driving Car Project, Google Contact Lens and Project Loon.· Jonathan Ross — Founder & CEO, Groq.· Dan Schulman — Ex-President & CEO, PayPal. Affiliations: CFR· Howie Liu — Founder & CEO, Airtable. Affiliations: WEF Technology Pioneer (company-level)*· Pete Shadbolt — Founder & Chief Science Officer, PsiQuantum.· Scott Stephenson — Chairman, President & CEO, Verisk Analytics. Affiliations: CFR· Immad Akhund — Founder & CEO, Mercury.· Sarah Bond — President of Xbox, Microsoft.· Fatima Kardar — VP & COO of Xbox, Microsoft.· Manuel Bronstein — Chief Product Officer, Roblox.· Scott Belsky — Partner, A24; ex-CSO/CPO, Adobe; founder, Behance.· Scott Cook — Co-founder & Chairman, Intuit.· Severin Hacker — Co-founder & CTO, Duolingo.· Mike Cannon-Brookes — Co-founder & Co-CEO, Atlassian. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader 2009*· Cesar Carvalho — Co-founder & CEO, Wellhub.· Marcos Galperin — Co-founder & CEO, MercadoLibre. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader*· Demet Mutlu — Founder & CEO, Trendyol Group. Affiliations: WEF Young Global Leader*· Strauss Zelnick — Chairman & CEO, Take-Two Interactive. Council on Foreign Relations· Caroline Cochran — Co-founder & COO, Oklo.· Mario Schlosser — Co-founder, Oscar Health (see correction note).· Raffi Grinberg — Executive Director, Dialog.Category 8 — Entertainment· Sophia Bush — Actress.· Joseph Gordon-Levitt — Actor.· Benj Pasek — Songwriter & producer (EGOT-class).· Drew Scott — Co-founder, Scott Brothers Global; Property Brothers.· Josh Brolin — Actor.Josh Brolin making the organized crime CIA look cool in the movie: Sicario. You have to be a complete scumbag (Sorry, Gibler! 😉 to make the murderous, drug dealing, regime changing, Mockingbird media manipulating CIA look cool. Search engine: The Phoenix Program to understand how the organized crime CIA murdered thousands of people extra judicially in Vietnam. They are organized crime parasites living off money stolen from others at the point of a gun.· Eva Price — CEO, Maximum Entertainment Productions.· Teresa Hsiao — Writer-producer (Family Guy, American Dad).· Scooter Braun — CEO, Hybe America; founder, Ithaca Holdings· Zach Shields — Executive producer & writer (Godzilla: King of the Monsters).Category 9 — Academics, authors, public intellectuals & policy· Garry Kasparov — Democracy advocate; ex-world chess champion, Aspen Commission on Information Disorder.· Jonathan Haidt — Social psychologist, NYU Stern; author.· Steven Pinker — Psychologist, Harvard; author.· Jonathan Levin — President, Stanford University; economist.· Anne-Marie Slaughter — CEO, New America; ex-State Dept Policy Planning. Affiliations: CFR· Roger Myerson — Economist, University of Chicago; Nobel laureate. Affiliations: CFR· Susan Athey — Professor, Stanford GSB; ex-DOJ chief economist.· Tyler Cowen — Professor of Economics & Director, Mercatus Center, GMU.· Peter Goettler — President, Cato Institute. Formerly Managing Director and Head of Investment Banking and Debt Capital Markets at Barclays Capital· Ryan Stowers — Executive Director, Charles Koch Foundation.· Leonard Leo — Co-Chairman, Federalist Society. sources.· Grover Norquist — President, Americans for Tax Reform. Affiliations: CFR· Adam Grant — Organizational psychologist, Wharton; author. Affiliations: Bilderberg (2019)‡; WEF Young Global Leader*· John Townsend — Author, Boundaries.· Tim Urban — Writer & illustrator, Wait But Why.· Rick Warren — Pastor; author, The Purpose Driven Life. Affiliations: CFR· Gretchen Rubin — Author & podcast host, The Happiness Project. Affiliations: CFR· Kim Scott — Author, Radical Candor.· Bob Cialdini — Author, Influence.· Charles Duhigg — Author, The Power of Habit.· Tim Ferriss — Author & podcast host.· Daniel Pink — Author; ex-chief speechwriter for VP Al Gore.· Sam Harris — Podcast host & author, Making Sense.· Lori Gottlieb — Psychotherapist & author; The Atlantic columnist.Category 10 — Health, biotech & science· Vas Narasimhan — CEO, Novartis. Affiliations: CFR· Peggy Hamburg — Ex-Commissioner, U.S. FDA. Affiliations: CFR· Atul Gawande — Author; ex-Assistant Administrator for Global Health, USAID.· Elizabeth Blackburn — Ex-President, Salk Institute; Nobel laureate.· Peter Attia — Physician, Attia Medical; author, Outlive.· Bryan Johnson — Founder & CEO, Kernel & Blueprint.· Shivon Zilis — Director, Neuralink.Category 11 — Other / NGO· Shadi Martini — CEO, MultiFaith Alliance (humanitarian aid).· Evan Marwell — Founder & CEO, EducationSuperHighway.About The AuthorEtienne de la Boetie2 is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation, and the editor of the Art of Liberty Daily News on Substack and Five Meme Friday, which delivers hard-hitting voluntaryist memes and the best of the alternative media. He is an internationally recognized expert and speaker on voluntaryism and government illegitimacy, criminality and corruption. His original writings and research can be found at ArtOfLiberty.org and ArtOfLiberty.Substack.comHe is the author of To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many which exposes an inter-generational psychological operation by the “government,” Hollywood, and the monopoly media to indoctrinate the population with the pseudo-religion of Statism using dozens of unethically manipulative techniques ranging from subliminal content in television programming to a hidden curriculum in the mandatory “government” schools, scouting, and police/military training.He has also authored: “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! which breaks down how inter-generational organized crime centered around banking and central banking is robbing and controlling the population using the technique of “government” with puppet politicians and monopoly media/academia. His upcoming book: Voluntaryism – How the Only “ISM” Fair for Everyone Leads to Harmony, Prosperity and Good Karma for All! explains how REAL freedom (voluntaryism) can provide all the legitimate non-redistributive services provided by “government” without the waste, fraud, abuse, indoctrination and extortion.About The Art Of Liberty FoundationThe Art of Liberty Foundation is dedicated to exposing the illegitimacy and criminality of monopoly “government” and central banking/fractional reserve banking and promoting voluntaryism — the only system of social organization based entirely on consent and REAL freedom — as the alternative.See ArtOfLiberty.org.The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. 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[OR… Why Central Planning is Doomed to Fail Even in the Age of Technocracy and AI ] Chapter 3 from our FREE paperback book: Hayek for the 21st CenturyEtienne Note: This is the 4th Article in our tribute to the great Austrian Economist Friedrich August von Hayek better known as F.A. Hayek. Some of Hayek’s core insights were that knowledge is dispersed across millions of individuals and cannot be aggregated by any central authority. Prices are information signals. When you override them with planning, you don’t just misallocate resources — you destroy the very mechanism by which society coordinates itself.But beyond economics, Hayek was a philosopher of spontaneous order — the idea that complex, functional systems emerge from human action without human design. Language, common law, markets, social norms — none are “planned,” and all work better than their planned alternatives. Hayek explained a sophisticated intellectual framework for voluntaryism operating in practice.In this essay, Hayek describes why central planning, by “governments” or “technocrats” isn’t just a bad idea… but impossible. Hayek’s central move is to reframe the economic problem. The problem isn’t “how do we allocate known resources efficiently” — a math problem a smart planner could in principle solve. It’s that the relevant knowledge never exists in one place. It exists only as dispersed, fragmentary, often contradictory bits held by millions of individuals, much of it tacit “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” that can’t be written down or transmitted to a central authority. The planner’s problem isn’t insufficient intelligence or insufficient computing power. It’s structural: the information the planner would need is destroyed the moment you try to centralize it, because much of it only exists in the act of a local person deciding to utilize (or not) utilize what he has on hand.Hayek’s critique still applies even in the age of AI: No amount of expert AI brilliance fixes a problem that is about the location of knowledge and individual preference, not the quantity of it.Hayek’s Example of a Tin ShortageA tin shortage appears somewhere in the world. Almost no one who reacts to it knows the cause — war, a new use, a mine collapse. They don’t need to. The price rises, and thousands of people who’ve never met economize on tin and its substitutes, passing the signal down the chain. Hayek’s line: the price system works “as a kind of machinery for registering change,” a system of telecommunications compressing a mountain of dispersed facts into one number that tells people what to do without telling them why. This is Chapter Three from Hayek for the 21st Century – Paperback available for Free with any purchase from ArtOfLiberty.org/Store, “Going Paid” on any of our Substacks or by paying S&H for the book. The copies are free thanks to the generosity of a donor to the Mises Institute and they have an offer with free S&H Here.Previous Chapters from Hayek for the 21st Century:Introduction by Thomas J DiLorenzo, President of the Mises Institute & Editor of Hayek for the 21st Century + Hayek bio, quotes, rap battles and memes!Chapter 1: The Intellectuals and Socialism by F.A. Hayek, Chapter 2: Why the Worst Get On Top [In “Government”] by F.A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in SocietyIWhat is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order?On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions. The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses.This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces. And the economic calculus which we have developed to solve this logical problem, though an important step toward the solution of the economic problem of society, does not yet provide an answer to it. The reason for this is that the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind which could work out the implications, and can never be so given.The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.This character of the fundamental problem has, I am afraid, been obscured rather than illuminated by many of the recent refinements of economic theory, particularly by many of the uses made of mathematics. Though the problem with which I want primarily to deal in this paper is the problem of a rational economic organization, I shall in its course be led again and again to point to its close connections with certain methodological questions. Many of the points I wish to make are indeed conclusions toward which diverse paths of reasoning have unexpectedly converged. But as I now see these problems, this is no accident. It seems to me that many of the current disputes with regard to both economic theory and economic policy have their common origin in a misconception about the nature of the economic problem of society. This misconception in turn is due to an erroneous transfer to social phenomena of the habits of thought we have developed in dealing with the phenomena of nature.IIIn ordinary language we describe by the word “planning” the complex of interrelated decisions about the allocation of our available resources. All economic activity is in this sense planning; and in any society in which many people collaborate, this planning, whoever does it, will in some measure have to be based on knowledge which, in the first instance, is not given to the planner but to somebody else, and which somehow will have to be conveyed to the planner. The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process. And the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about “economic planning” centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The half-way house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question of under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. And this, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans in with those of others.IIIIt will at once be evident that on this point the position will be different with respect to different kinds of knowledge; and the answer to our question will therefore largely turn on the relative importance of the different kinds of knowledge; those more likely to be at the disposal of particular individuals and those which we should with greater confidence expect to find in the possession of an authority made up of suitably chosen experts. If it is today so widely assumed that the latter will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant. It may be admitted that, so far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available—though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts. What I wish to point out is that, even assuming that this problem can be readily solved, it is only a small part of the wider problem.Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation. We need only to remember how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances. To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody’s skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques. And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.It is a curious fact that this sort of knowledge should today be generally regarded with a kind of contempt, and that anyone who by such knowledge gains an advantage over somebody better equipped with theoretical or technical knowledge is thought to have acted almost disreputably. To gain an advantage from better knowledge of facilities of communication or transport is sometimes regarded as almost dishonest, although it is quite as important that society make use of the best opportunities in this respect as in using the latest scientific discoveries. This prejudice has in a considerable measure affected the attitude toward commerce in general compared with that toward production. Even economists who regard themselves as definitely above the crude materialist fallacies of the past constantly commit the same mistake where activities directed toward the acquisition of such practical knowledge are concerned—apparently because in their scheme of things all such knowledge is supposed to be “given.” The common idea now seems to be that all such knowledge should as a matter of course be readily at the command of everybody, and the reproach of irrationality leveled against the existing economic order is frequently based on the fact that it is not so available. This view disregards the fact that the method by which such knowledge can be made as widely available as possible is precisely the problem to which we have to find an answer.IVIf it is fashionable today to minimize the importance of the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place, this is closely connected with the smaller importance which is now attached to change as such. Indeed, there are few points on which the assumptions made (usually only implicitly) by the “planners” differ from those of their opponents as much as with regard to the significance and frequency of changes which will make substantial alterations of production plans necessary. Of course, if detailed economic plans could be laid down for fairly long periods in advance and then closely adhered to, so that no further economic decisions of importance would be required, the task of drawing up a comprehensive plan governing all economic activity would appear much less formidable.It is, perhaps, worth stressing that economic problems arise always and only in consequence of change. So long as things continue as before, or at least as they were expected to, there arise no new problems requiring a decision, no need to form a new plan. The belief that changes, or at least day-to-day adjustments, have become less important in modern times implies the contention that economic problems also have become less important. This belief in the decreasing importance of change is, for that reason, usually held by the same people who argue that the importance of economic considerations has been driven into the background by the growing importance of technological knowledge.Is it true that, with the elaborate apparatus of modern production, economic decisions are required only at long intervals, as when a new factory is to be erected or a new process to be introduced? Is it true that, once a plant has been built, the rest is all more or less mechanical, determined by the character of the plant, and leaving little to be changed in adapting to the ever-changing circumstances of the moment?The fairly widespread belief in the affirmative is not, so far as I can ascertain, borne out by the practical experience of the business man. In a competitive industry at any rate—and such an industry alone can serve as a test—the task of keeping cost from rising requires constant struggle, absorbing a great part of the energy of the manager. How easy it is for an inefficient manager to dissipate the differentials on which profitability rests, and that it is possible, with the same technical facilities, to produce with a great variety of costs, are among the commonplaces of business experience which do not seem to be equally familiar in the study of the economist. The very strength of the desire, constantly voiced by producers and engineers, to be able to proceed untrammeled by considerations of money costs is eloquent testimony to the extent to which these factors enter into their daily work.One reason why economists are increasingly apt to forget about the constant small changes which make up the whole economic picture is probably their growing preoccupation with statistical aggregates, which show a very much greater stability than the movements of the detail. The comparative stability of the aggregates cannot, however, be accounted for—as the statisticians occasionally seem to be inclined to do—by the “law of large numbers” or the mutual compensation of random changes. The number of elements with which we have to deal is not large enough for such accidental forces to produce stability. The continuous flow of goods and services is maintained by constant deliberate adjustments, by new dispositions made every day in the light of circumstances not known the day before, by B stepping in at once when A fails to deliver. Even the large and highly mechanized plant keeps going largely because of an environment upon which it can draw for all sorts of unexpected needs; tiles for its roof, stationery for its forms, and all the thousand and one kinds of equipment in which it cannot be self-contained and which the plans for the operation of the plant require to be readily available in the market.This is, perhaps, also the point where I should briefly mention the fact that the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place, and that the central planner will have to find some way or other in which the decisions depending on them can be left to the “man on the spot.”VIf we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we ensure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the “man on the spot” cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system.How much knowledge does he need to do so successfully? Which of the events which happen beyond the horizon of his immediate knowledge are of relevance to his immediate decision, and how much of them need he know?There is hardly anything that happens anywhere in the world that might not have an effect on the decision he ought to make. But he need not know of these events as such, nor of all their effects. It does not matter for him why at the particular moment more screws of one size than of another are wanted, why paper bags are more readily available than canvas bags, or why skilled labor, or particular machine tools, have for the moment become more difficult to acquire. All that is significant for him is how much more or less difficult to procure they have become compared with other things with which he is also concerned, or how much more or less urgently wanted are the alternative things he produces or uses. It is always a question of the relative importance of the particular things with which he is concerned, and the causes which alter their relative importance are of no interest to him beyond the effect on those concrete things of his own environment.It is in this connection that what I have called the economic calculus proper helps us, at least by analogy, to see how this problem can be solved, and in fact is being solved, by the price system. Even the single controlling mind, in possession of all the data for some small, self-contained economic system, would not—every time some small adjustment in the allocation of resources had to be made—go explicitly through all the relations between ends and means which might possibly be affected. It is indeed the great contribution of the pure logic of choice that it has demonstrated conclusively that even such a single mind could solve this kind of problem only by constructing and constantly using rates of equivalence (or “values,” or “marginal rates of substitution”), i.e., by attaching to each kind of scarce resource a numerical index which cannot be derived from any property possessed by that particular thing, but which reflects, or in which is condensed, its significance in view of the whole means-end structure. In any small change he will have to consider only these quantitative indices (or “values”) in which all the relevant information is concentrated; and by adjusting the quantities one by one, he can appropriately rearrange his dispositions without having to solve the whole puzzle ab initio, or without needing at any stage to survey it at once in all its ramifications.Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coordinate the parts of his plan. It is worth contemplating for a moment a very simple and commonplace instance of the action of the price system to see what precisely it accomplishes. Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere, and that in consequence they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all this without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.VIWe must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function—a function which, of course, it fulfills less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. (Even when quoted prices have become quite rigid, however, the forces which would operate through changes in price still operate to a considerable extent through changes in the other terms of the contract.) The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on, and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.Of course, these adjustments are probably never “perfect” in the sense in which the economist conceives of them in his equilibrium analysis. But I fear that our theoretical habit of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level.I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction”—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and, therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a coordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the “state” of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type. All that we can say is that nobody has yet succeeded in designing an alternative system in which certain features of the existing one can be preserved which are dear even to those who most violently assail it—such as particularly the extent to which the individual can choose his pursuits and consequently freely use his own knowledge and skill.VIIIt is in many ways fortunate that the dispute about the indispensability of the price system for any rational calculation in a complex society is now no longer conducted entirely between camps holding different political views. The thesis that without the price system we could not preserve a society based on such extensive division of labor as ours was greeted with a howl of derision when it was first advanced by von Mises twenty-five years ago. Today the difficulties which some still find in accepting it are no longer mainly political, and this makes for an atmosphere much more conducive to reasonable discussion. When we find Leon Trotsky arguing that “economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations”; when Professor Oscar Lange promises Professor von Mises a statue in the marble halls of the future Central Planning Board; and when Professor Abba P. Lerner rediscovers Adam Smith and emphasizes that the essential utility of the price system consists in inducing the individual, while seeking his own interest, to do what is in the general interest, the differences can indeed no longer be ascribed to political prejudice. The remaining dissent seems clearly to be due to purely intellectual, and more particularly methodological, differences.A recent statement by Professor Joseph Schumpeter in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy provides a clear illustration of one of the methodological differences which I have in mind. Its author is pre-eminent among those economists who approach economic phenomena in the light of a certain branch of positivism. To him these phenomena accordingly appear as objectively given quantities of commodities impinging directly upon each other, almost, it would seem, without any intervention of human minds. Only against this background can I account for the following (to me startling) pronouncement. Professor Schumpeter argues that the possibility of a rational calculation in the absence of markets for the factors of production follows for the theorist “from the elementary proposition that consumers in evaluating (‘demanding’) consumers’ goods ipso facto also evaluate the means of production which enter into the production of these goods.”¹Taken literally, this statement is simply untrue. The consumers do nothing of the kind. What Professor Schumpeter’s “ipso facto” presumably means is that the valuation of the factors of production is implied in, or follows necessarily from, the valuation of consumers’ goods. But this, too, is not correct. Implication is a logical relationship which can be meaningfully asserted only of propositions simultaneously present to one and the same mind. It is evident, however, that the values of the factors of production do not depend solely on the valuation of the consumers’ goods but also on the conditions of supply of the various factors of production. Only to a mind to which all these facts were simultaneously known would the answer necessarily follow from the facts given to it. The practical problem, however, arises precisely because these facts are never so given to a single mind, and because, in consequence, it is necessary that in the solution of the problem knowledge should be used that is dispersed among many people.The problem is thus in no way solved if we can show that all the facts, if they were known to a single mind (as we hypothetically assume them to be given to the observing economist), would uniquely determine the solution; instead we must show how a solution is produced by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge. To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.That an economist of Professor Schumpeter’s standing should thus have fallen into a trap which the ambiguity of the term “datum” sets to the unwary can hardly be explained as a simple error. It suggests rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man’s knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people’s knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleadsThe peculiar character of the problem some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem.The Art of Liberty Foundation is honoring the Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, one of the most important economists to have ever lived, with a campaign that will both syndicate the new book: Hayek for the 21st Century – Essays in Political Economy and provide free paperback copies of the book to anyone who goes paid on our Substack as an annual member and/or orders anything from ArtOfLiberty.org/store.This introduction to F.A. Hayek includes his biography, memes, quotes, “Rap Battles” with economist Lord John Maynard Keynes, and the first installment of our syndication of Hayek for the 21st Century – Essays in Political Economy: The Introduction to the book by Thomas J DiLorenzo, President of the Mises Institute & Editor of Hayek for the 21st CenturyWe are also adding the full PDF of Hayek for the 21st Century to our uncensorable flash drive of Freedom: The Liberator.BiographyF. A. Hayek’s life spanned the twentieth century, and he made his home in some of the great intellectual communities of the period.Born Friedrich August von Hayek in 1899 to a distinguished family of Viennese intellectuals, Hayek attended the University of Vienna, earning doctorates in 1921 and 1923. Hayek came to the University at age 19 just after World War I, when it was one of the three best places in the world to study economics (the others being Stockholm and Cambridge).Like many students of economics then and since, Hayek chose the subject not for its own sake, but because he wanted to improve social conditions—the poverty of postwar Vienna serving as a daily reminder of such a need. Socialism seemed to provide a solution. Then in 1922 Mises published his Die Gemeinwirtschaft, later translated as Socialism. “To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared,” Hayek recalled, “the world was ever the same again.” It was around this time that Hayek began attending Mises’s famed Privatseminar. For several years the Privatseminar was the center of the economics community in Vienna.Later, Hayek became the first of this group to leave Vienna; most of the others, along with Mises himself, were also gone by the start of World War II.At the L.S.E. Hayek lectured on Mises’s business-cycle theory, which he was refining and which, until Keynes’s General Theory came out in 1936, was rapidly gaining adherents in Britain and the U.S. and was becoming the preferred explanation of the Depression. Hayek and Keynes had sparred in the early 1930s in the pages of the Economic Journal, over Keynes’s Treatise on Money.Within a very few years, however, the fortunes of the Austrian School suffered a dramatic reversal. Mises left Vienna in 1934 for Geneva and then New York, where he continued to work in isolation; Hayek remained at the L.S.E. until 1950, when he joined the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Other Austrians of Hayek’s generation became prominent in the U.S. but their work no longer seemed to show distinct traces of the tradition founded by Carl Menger.At Chicago Hayek again found himself among a dazzling group. But economic theory, in particular its style of reasoning, was rapidly changing. In addition, Hayek had ceased to work on economic theory, concentrating instead on psychology, philosophy, and politics, and Austrian economics entered a prolonged eclipse.When the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics went to Hayek, interest in the Austrian School was suddenly and unexpectedly revived. Hayek’s writings were taught to new generations, and Hayek himself appeared at the early Institute for Humane Studies conferences in the mid-1970s. He continued to write, producing The Fatal Conceit in 1988, at the age of 89.Hayek died in 1992 in Freiburg, Germany, where he had lived since leaving Chicago in 1961.Among mainstream economists, he is mainly known for his popular The Road to Serfdom (1944) and for his work on knowledge in the 1930s and 1940s. Specialists in business cycle theory recognize his early work on industrial fluctuations, and modern information theorists often acknowledge Hayek’s work on prices as signals, although his conclusions are typically disputed. Hayek’s work is also known in political philosophy, legal theory, and psychology.Within the Austrian School of economics, Hayek’s influence, while undeniably immense, has very recently become the subject of some controversy. His emphasis on spontaneous order and his work on complex systems has been widely influential among many Austrians. Others have preferred to stress Hayek’s work in technical economics, particularly on capital and the business cycle, citing a tension between some of Hayek’s and Mises’s views on the social order.Hayek’s writings on capital, money, and the business cycle are widely regarded as his most important contributions to economics. Building on Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Hayek showed how fluctuations in economy-wide output and employment are related to the economy’s capital structure. In Prices and Production (1931) he introduced the famous “Hayekian triangles” to illustrate the relationship between the value of capital goods and their place in the temporal sequence of production.In Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933) Hayek showed how monetary injections, by lowering the rate of interest below what Mises (following Wicksell) called its “natural rate,” distort the economy’s intertemporal structure of production. Most theories of the effects of money on prices and output (then and since) consider only the effects of the total money supply on the price level and aggregate output or investment.Hayek’s writings on dispersed knowledge and spontaneous order are also widely known, but more controversial. In “Economics and Knowledge” (1937) and “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) Hayek argued that the central economic problem facing society is not, as is commonly expressed in textbooks, the allocation of given resources among competing ends.It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.Clearly, the Austrian revival owes much to Hayek. He ranks among the greatest members of the Austrian School, and among the leading economists of the twentieth century. His work continues to be influential in business cycle theory, comparative economic systems, political and social philosophy, legal theory, and even cognitive psychology. Hayek remains one of the most intriguing intellectual figures of our time.Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek – The Original Economics Rap Battle!F.A Hayek vs. John Maynard Keynes square off in Fear the Boom and Bust – The Original Economics Rap Battle where Keynes, who advocated “government” action during periods of recession and depression and “wants to steer markets” squares off against F.A Hayek, who advocates for low taxation and savings-led investment by those who best understand their industries… Hayek “wants them set free”Full Lyrics Here: https://genius.com/John-papola-fear-the-boom-and-bust-hayek-vs-keynes-lyricsFight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek – Economics Rap Battle Round TwoFull Lyrics Here: https://genius.com/Econstories-fight-of-the-century-lyricsWhich way should we choose?More bottom-up or more top-down?The fight continuesKeynes and Hayek, second roundIt’s time to weigh inMore from the top or from the ground?Let’s listen to the greatsKeynes and Hayek throwin’ downIntroduction to Hayek for the 21st CenturyIntroduction by Thomas J DiLorenzo, President of the Mises Institute & Editor of Hayek for the 21st CenturyThe rest of Hayek for the 21st Century will be syndicated in the coming weeks.In a February 7, 2000, article in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy wrote that “it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century.” He said this because of Friedrich Hayek’s prominent role throughout the century in defending free market capitalism and his critiques of socialism, especially his writings on the importance of decentralized knowledge in economic decision-making. Hayek lived to see his ideas proven correct with the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late eighties and early nineties. Watching the images of the collapse on television he said to his son, “I told you so.”The Knowledge ProblemThe “knowledge problem” is Hayek’s key contribution to the critique of socialism. It recognizes the commonsense notion that what makes the economic world go around is the use of knowledge by all kinds of people with different abilities, educations, experiences, and skills. Thanks to this international division of labor and knowledge, we collaborate “as though led by an invisible hand” in order to mutually prosper. It all depends of course on freedom—the freedom to own property, to pursue a profession of your Introduction 7 8 Hayek for the 21st Century choosing, to start and run a business, to buy and sell, to be guided in your decisions by free market prices. By contrast, socialism in all of its varieties is based on the opposite idea—that what is supposedly needed for prosperity is totalitarian powers in the hands of a small number of politicians and “planners” who will forcefully impose a single plan on an entire society. Hayek labeled this “the fatal conceit” of socialism in his last book. The entire world now knows that he was right, and all of the socialist tyrants and their propagandists and court historians were (and are) wrong.Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and “The Pretense of Knowledge,” reprinted here, are the two best expositions of the Hayekian knowledge problem. Indeed, John Cassidy credited Hayek with providing an explanation of the workings of “the information age” of the internet that would develop some fifty years after he first started writing about the importance of decentralized information in society. This is not mere speculation on Cassidy’s part. As just one example, the cofounder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, claims to have gotten the idea for Wikipedia as an Auburn University undergraduate finance student aft er Mises Institute Research Fellow Mark Thornton got him to read “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Hayek called free market capitalism guided by private property and free market prices a “telecommunications system,” which Cassidy suggested was “one of the great insights of the [twentieth] century.”Hayek’s Demolition of Socialists and Their IdeasHayek wrote in a 1961 Southern Economic Journal article (“The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,’” republished here) that for over a hundred years socialists had argued that “the problem of production” had been solved, so that “only the problem of distribution remains.” At the time, the “latest form of this old contention” was in the form of numerous books by the socialist Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the best known of which was The Affluent Society. Galbraith argued in books and articles that all “essential needs” are already met, and that most of what people think are other “needs” are really fake needs created by the brainwashing effects of advertising. Only “innate” needs that we think of ourselves are useful, said Galbraith; everything else that is brought to our attention by others is therefore useless and wasteful. Therefore, the argument went, government should tax more and spend more for what it deems to be our genuinely useful needs. What is genuinely useful would of course be determined by politicians—presumably with the assistance of John Kenneth Galbraith.Hayek called this argument “a complete non sequitur.” It implies for one thing that “the whole cultural achievement of man is not important.” The only genuinely innate human needs, said Hayek, are food, shelter, and sex. Everything else is brought to our attention by someone. Hayek’s article is a complete demolition of the Galbraithian system and his life’s work of promoting what Hayek called increasing “the share of the resources whose use is determined by political authority and the coercion of any dissenting minority.”In 1949 Hayek authored “The Intellectuals and Socialism” in The University of Chicago Law Review. His argument is as relevant today as it was then—if not more relevant. Contrary to the common argument that “intellectuals” have little influence on day-to-day discussions about public policy, Hayek argued that “over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today.” He pointed out that socialism was never a “working class” movement but was always hatched from the utopian dreams of “theorists” who spent 10 decades preaching their socialist utopianism in university classrooms and all throughout the culture. In many countries the result of this decades-long propagandizing for socialism was that the views held by socialist intellectuals became “the governing force of politics,” wrote Hayek. The “intellectual” spreaders of socialist ideas were not just academics but also “journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists,” among many others, including “scientists and doctors.” It is “the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us.”Eventually, so many institutions are taken over by socialists that an intellectual who espouses the philosophical foundations of a free society, by contrast, “soon discovers that it is unsafe to associate too closely with those who seem to share most of his convictions and he is driven into isolation.” This sounds like a perfect description of today’s American university world. Nevertheless, all is not lost, Hayek concluded. What is needed is education about a classical “liberal Utopia” to counter the endless promises of socialist utopias—not a “diluted kind of socialism,” he wrote, but a “truly liberal radicalism” that does not pull punches to please any special interest group. Leave the compromising to the politicians, he advised.Hayek was relentless in his devastating critiques of socialism and interventionism, and nowhere is this more on display than in his essay “The Meaning of Competition.” By the 1940s the academic economics profession had adopted a straw-man argument version of competition. Rather than the Austrian School conception of competition as a dynamic, rivalrous discovery process, competition was newly defined as a static situation where “many” business firms all produced a homogeneous product and charged identical prices in a world where all market participants had “perfect knowledge” of everything—what consumers wanted, how to minimize costs and maximize profits, and so on. They called it “perfect competition.” In his essay Hayek explained that “‘perfect’ competition means indeed the absence of all competitive activities” because all of it—product differentiation, price cutting, mergers, advertising—was all assumed away by the perfect competition “model.”This method of analysis was later labeled a “nirvana fallacy” by UCLA economist Harold Demsetz. Positing a utopian never-never land and comparing it to the real world, and then condemning real-world markets as “failed” because they are “imperfect,” is one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated by the economics profession.In “Choice in Currency” Hayek did not oppose government issuance of money but instead opposed governmental monopoly and governments’ “power to limit the kinds of money in which contracts may be concluded.” Competing currencies could be valued “in seconds” with “electronic calculators,” Hayek wrote, long before the invention of the cell phone. Competition in currencies would be the path to honest money, for “even the slightest deviation from the path of honesty would reduce the demand for their product.” It is little wonder that Hayek’s writings on competing currencies have become enormously popular among advocates of cryptocurrencies.Hayekian Political PhilosophyOddly enough, despite all of his contributions to economic science and his Nobel Prize, what Friedrich Hayek is most known for among the general public is his writings on political philosophy, in particular his infamous book The Road to Serfdom, a critique of collectivism in all its forms. Hayek did not distinguish between fascism and socialism, the former being just a variant of the latter, with a common hatred of private property, free enterprise, economic freedom in general, constitutionalism, and the rule of law. The most famous chapter of The Road to Serfdom is chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” republished here. Since any kind of socialism requires a central plan for all of society, it also requires the use of massive governmental force (and censorship of critics) to implement the plan. Consequently, the kind of people who would rise to the top of such a system are those with the fewest qualms about coercing, imprisoning, and brutalizing (or worse) their fellow citizens, wrote Hayek. That is why, he wrote, “the practice of socialism is everywhere totalitarian.”Hopefully, this brief introduction has helped the reader to understand why the journalist John Cassidy was so inspired by the power of Hayek’s scholarship and writings that he made a case that the entire twentieth century (the good parts of it, anyway) should be thought of as “the Hayek century.” Ludwig von Mises was surely right when, he said that “Doctor Hayek . . . will be remembered as one of the great economists of all time”.Thomas J. DiLorenzoQuotes & Memes“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time”― Friedrich August von Hayek, Constitution of Liberty“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.”― Friedrich von Hayek“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.”― F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“The more the state “plans” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”― Friedrich A. Hayek“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable…it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.” ― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.”― F.A. Hayek“I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano’s Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope..”― Friedrich August von Hayek“Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.”― Friedrich Hayek“While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”― Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice“Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.”― Friedrich A. Hayek“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”― Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism“It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty“From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.”― Friedrich A. von Hayek“It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behaviour as individuals within the group.”― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.”― Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty“Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.”― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to SerfdomGet a paperback copy of Hayek for the 21st Century for FREEAs part of the Art of Liberty Foundation’s Tribute to Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, in cooperation with the Mises Institute and the US Justice Charitable Foundation who provided free copies, the Art of Liberty Foundation is helping promote and distribute the book to anyone who “Goes Paid” as an annual member on Substack OR makes a purchase at ArtOfLiberty.org/Store.Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many, the PDF of Hayek for the 21st Century and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive PLUS a paperback copy of Hayek for the 21st Century if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many PLUS everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought PLUS a paperback copy of Hayek for the 21st Century delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.

The Difference Between a Free Man and a Slave is the Ability to Say: NOThe ability to be (relatively) successful in the United States vs. other “government” tax farms is by some seen by some as something to celebrate. While I understand that the Art of Liberty Foundation has a high-quality audience of independent thinkers able to see through the lies, indoctrination and propaganda of the mandatory “government” schools, monopoly media, and algorithmic promotion/censorship of the DARPA Internet, I wanted to take a moment to help your friends, family and colleagues better understand the reality of their situation. Tax Slavery is still Slavery No Matter How Well Disguised – The difference between a free man and a slave is the ability to say: NO. BTW, on a related note: The difference between being honorably enslaved and being a broke back (Tax) Slave is: Are you resisting? There is a hierarchy of chattel slavery and tax slavery ranging from honorable to traitorous filth and NOT understanding the reality of your situation is lower on the ladder because, as Goethe put it so eloquently: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”Many people have been successful in the United States because a tremendous amount of wealth was created through the hard money, available land, and light-to-non-existent “government” in the early days of the country that has carried over to this time. That hard money and freedom has been replaced with rapidly depreciating fiat paper tickets, base-metal tokens instead of coins, and an organized crime “government” ratcheting up surveillance and control. Find your income level on the chart above to understand how much the organized crime banks and “government” will steal from you over a 40-year career & 20-year retirement. Details at Greatest-Theft.com In the same way that a rancher might give some animals more paddock or better living conditions (stalls for horses) because of their value to the rancher, don’t believe you are a truly free human being because you have it better than most. The house slave wasn’t free just because they had it better than the field hand. Never forget: there is a gun to your head if you decide to stop paying, wielded by a shave-headed cult member that has been indoctrinated into the religion of Statism and will kill you if you resist. The organized crime “Government” is running “Pimp Game” on the population to get them to go along with the Tax Slavery – A “pimp” is an individual who runs unethically manipulative techniques on women to get them to turn over their money to them, ostensibly for “protection.”This is essentially, in a nutshell, the same game that “governments” run on their populations to get them to semi-voluntarily turn over a significant portion of their income for “protection.”Many of the women, and undoubtedly some men, become psychologically and financially dependent on the pimp… the same way that many women and men become psychologically and financially dependent on the “government”Even when the women are abused or lied to by the pimp, many will stay loyal because of these techniques and the belief that they MUST have a Pimp/Man/Protector.Many Statists will, even after they have been repeatedly lied to and abused by the “government,” through lockdowns, mask mandates, involuntary servitude (drafts) and confiscatory taxation, to name a few abuses, will still self-identify as “Americans” (or Canadian, Australians, Englishmen, etc.) and stay loyal because of the techniques and belief that they MUST have a “Government”/ProtectorThe Organized Crime “Government” is Using DOZENS of Unethically Manipulative “Cult Indoctrination Techniques” in Their Mandatory “Government” Schools, Scouting Programs, Explorer Programs, and Police/Military Training to Create Unquestioning Obedience & Dependency in the Police/Military – In my book, To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many, I break down DOZENS of unethically manipulative “cult creation techniques” the organized crime “government” and monopoly media use to indoctrinate the population into a religious devotion to the US flag, the US “Government” and having a ruling class. The “government” (and their accomplice Hollywood) have been tricking the population by controlling the information you receive about the legitimacy, desirability and necessity of having a “government.” They can even trick sThe 4th of July Holiday is a Trick as Well – The 25th Technique I break down in the book is: National Holidays and Celebrations are Associated with the “Government” and Flag – I am replicating the entire page from the book below, but the executive summary is the “government” that is tax farming the population for more than 1/2 their income is giving an infinitesimal portion back in fireworks, parades, and a day off while forcing the population to work without pay for 5-6 months of the year when you include the overt taxes, covert taxes, and inflation, is engaged in a form of marketing known as “Anchoring” that I spell out in the book.A page from To See the Cage is To Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many. This is the 25th technique in the book, and it also includes the infamous “26th technique” that I have been mentioning in my podcast appearances.25. National holidays and celebrations are associated with the government and flag- In another example of the marketing technique of “anchoring”, the government has mandated that certain days are set aside to celebrate it. Many Americans overlook the fact that the government is forcing them to work unpaid for five-six months out of the year, and celebrate a single day off that has been, in the case of the 4 of July, linked by the media and pop culture to feasting, drinking, parades, and parties at the lake!Local governments typically provide fireworks events at taxpayer expense. In the parade examples below (ABOVE), the Boy Scouts are wearing white gloves to handle the holy flag. The artificial honor of the flag could have been technique 26, as the flag can not be thrown away when old but must be “retired” in an official ceremony conducted regularly by American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, Cub Scout, Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops, and others. The holy flag is ceremonially burned, and in some cases, its ashes are collected and buried.A statue of the original Etienne de la Boetie with his famous quote that not all men are tricked by the unethically manipulative techniques of the rulers.The tick of the 4th of July is very similar to the original Etienne de la Boetie’s observations from the 1560s where he broke down similar techniques used by monarchs and Caesars to trick the rabble into going along with “government. ”1. On holidays, spectacles and feasts as tools of distraction“Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates … Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else.”2. On the illusion of largess“Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King!’ The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.”3. On the nature of servitude through delight“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by worm‑y bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed … Plays, farces, spectacles … were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny.”It’s not that there is nothing to celebrate on the 4th of July, because there were victories at the time over the tyranny of the monarchy.The issue today is that the organized crime “government” is stealing a SIGNIFICANTLY larger portion of the population’s wealth while violently violating their natural law rights, spying on them, stealing the value out of their money through the inflation of fractional reserve banking and “quantitative easing.”The “Government” is openly being run as a criminal enterprise where TRILLIONS of dollars are going out the back door to Wall Street, defense contractors, Big Pharma, Big Ag, etc. while the “president” takes payoffs including $400M 747s, selling tickets to dine with him, and running crypto scams.The list of taxes today doesn’t include the new “tariffs” which are passed along to consumers as higher prices (a stealth tax) AND it doesn’t include the inflation of fractional reserve banking and “quantitative easing” which is another stealth tax.The total is easily over 50%+ when those are included.In addition, the organized crime “government” has eviscerated almost every single natural law right in the Bill of Rights from the 2nd amendment being shredded through Red Flag Laws, where Trump himself declared, “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” to the 4th amendment which is routinely disregarded at airports, courthouses, and traffic stops.I was a firsthand witness to a friend’s car being searched, where the officer told my friend, “You have two choices: #1 We can search the car OR #2 We can search the car, but it takes longer.” Maryland alone has stolen over 5,000+ firearms and murdered Gary Willis, a 61-year-old man and one of the first Red Flag Law victims, who thought he had a 2nd Amendment and resisted having his gun stolen by the immoral, shave-headed gunmen of the state.Finis! – The End of the Free Preview…What is Behind the Paywall Today?More Dank Voluntaryist Memes on the 4th of July!About the AuthorEtienne de la Boetie2 is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation and the editor of the Art of Liberty Daily News on Substack and Five Meme Friday, which delivers hard-hitting voluntaryist memes and the best of the alternative media. He is an internationally recognized expert and speaker on voluntaryism and government illegitimacy, criminality and corruption. His original writings and research can be found at ArtOfLiberty.org and ArtOfLiberty.Substack.comHe is the author of the new book To See the Cage is the To Leave It – 25 Techniques That the Few Use to Control the Many which pulls back the curtain on one of history’s most successful psychological operations: The US government and the monopoly media have been using a variety of unethically manipulative techniques to get free and independent human beings to self-identify as “Americans” so they can be tax farmed. The techniques range from mandatory schools to anchoring/product placing the flag in moments of high positive emotion in movies and television shows. From a hidden curriculum in scouting to subliminal programming in television “programming”.Boetie2 is also the author of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! which breaks down how inter-generational organized crime centered around banking and central banking is robbing and controlling the population using the technique of “government” with puppet politicians and monopoly media/academia. His upcoming book: Voluntaryism – How the Only “ISM” Fair for Everyone Leads to Harmony, Prosperity and Good Karma for All! explains how REAL freedom (voluntaryism) can provide all the legitimate non-redistributive services offered by “government” without the waste, fraud, abuse, indoctrination and extortion.About the Art of Liberty FoundationA start-up public policy organization: Voluntaryist crime fighters exposing the illegitimacy and criminality of “government,” and their partnership with monopoly media/academia. The foundation promotes voluntary free market solutions, charities vs. inefficient “government” aid based on extortion.The foundation is the publisher of Important News from the Art of Liberty Foundation, The Daily News from the Art of Liberty Foundation and Five Meme Friday – a weekly e-mail or Telegram summary of the best of the alternative media, censored truth videos, and at least five hot, fresh, dank liberty memes every week, and “Government,” Media, and Academia Exposed! – A Telegram summary of the best mainstream and alternative news stories proving our thesis that intergenerational organized crime interests are hierarchically controlling all three.The foundation’s recent conference, Liberty on the Rocks – Sedona – The Voluntaryism Conference featured leading economists, legal scholars, and political theorists explaining how the free market can provide all the legitimate, non-redistributive services provided by monopoly “government” better, faster and cheaper without the waste, fraud, abuse and extortion.The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne at an event.What is Behind the Paywall Today?More Dank Voluntaryist Memes on the 4th of July!