A National Year Off

My decision to retire early, back in 2011, was in part based on my frustration with the political-economic system. Norway had just spent a small fortune bombing Libya back to the stone ages, and no-one around me seemed to care. The fact that tax rates had reached more than 100% for many individuals, and was at a staggering 70% for me didn't receive any sympathy either. It was as if I was the only one seeing the corruption in the system, and I saw no reason to support it with any of my taxes.

What followed was a period of anger and unease that didn't subside before I finally managed to put together a proper plan for my own survival back in 2016. Before then, I spent quite a few hours trying to come up with ways to band together with others in order to provoke some real resistance to the suicidal path that Norwegian politicians had embarked on. Little did I know back then that one of my plans would be implemented globally by none other than the politicians themselves.

The idea was to get as many productive people as possible to stop doing their productive work, thereby forcing the state to pull back regulation and taxation. It was a half baked plan with no hope of success, but it recognized the plain economic fact that all taxation rests on productive individuals, and that no taxation is possible without our consent. While money printing can paper over the initial shock of a coordinated lockdown, the system will soon crumble. My guess was that a year long lockdown would be sufficient to force real changes onto the system.

The lockdown was supposed to be voluntary. I imagined a great movement of frustrated individuals, all retreating for a year, voluntarily reducing their consumption to a minimum. I called it a national year off, and it was of course doomed to failure. This type of lockdown is only possible through state coercion.

It's ironic that what I imagined more than 5 years ago as a popular movement against the state has in fact transpired, but as a movement by the state against individuals. However, the economic effect is unlikely to turn out very different, so it appears to me that the state is unwittingly shooting itself in the foot. The lockdown seems to be aimed against the little entrepreneur, with the idea being that corporations will do better without competition from the little guys. But this ignores the fact that the little guys support the big guys, not only as customers, but also as service providers. Corporations cannot exist without the eco-system of smaller actors to support them.

Once small businesses shutter, customers and services essential for the survival of corporations will be gone, and the system will collapse. This will in turn force a reset of some kind, but any reset that fails to address the needs of the small business entrepreneur will be short lived. Only a return to small government and sound money can save governments from the national year off that they have engineered, and it's positively surreal to watch this unfold in real time, considering the amount of hours I spent imagining this happening back in the days.

Early retirement